Late post:
Took out a friend that popped into town before he was heading off to training camp, hit the water before the sun came up. We were rewarded within 5 minutes with a scrappy 10lber (Pale pink/white) Another pass over Macaulay and another fish, we released this 4lber. Another pass and another fish, unfortunately it was a short line release by the boat (7-8lb) and we made another pass and another hit, but it didn’t stick. Four passes, four 4 hits all within an hour and a bit. 3 at 66’ 1 at 53’ all on bait.
Then by the sounds out it, we left right around the major bite, but we had to go buy some herring, because Joe had never been halibut fishing, off to the Esquilmalt anglers to purchase some bait. Raced out to my halibut grounds and set up the anchor…..so I thought. We were drifting .3-.5 and we really shouldn‘t have been, but we fished for about 45 minutes when I said let’s pull up the anchor and reset over the spot. Right from the get go there was way too much strain on the boat pulling the anchor. Managed to set the anchor in the ball, and now i am retrieving it. But about 400’ into 700’ of rope, there was way too much weight and almost impossible to pull up. I have a danforth/fluke anchor, and what happened is we managed to trap a rope of another anchor between our fluke and the shank, which wouldn’t allow the flukes to dig into the mud. Needless to say that after retrieving our anchor, and then the other anchor and then resetting up, we lost over an hour of fishing time. We were on the anchor fishing for a couple of hours, managed a couple of bites (dogs) but no takers on the halibut. Joe had to be on the ice, so we headed back to the docks for 1pm.
here is the long shot: if you’ve lost an anchor, and can describe it, send me a message
I read lots of fish being caught, but when I talked to the DFO guy at 1:30, he said that we brought 1 of the 10 fish in that had been caught, out of 27 boats he had talked to.